CHAPTER 45

JUNE 1835

St. Claire laughed. "You'll have to give her a meaning or she'll make one."

Harriet beecher stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin, 1852

Philadelphia, July 4th, 1776

He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation hither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the christian king of Great Britain, determined to keep open a market where men should be bought and sold. He has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce, and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchasing that liberty of which he deprived them, by murdering the people on whom he also obstruded them; thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.

thomas jefferson

The Declaration of Independence, 1776 (Excised from the final draft by consensus)

Nathan Langdon released the pressure of his thighs and reined in his horse. He had just taken the rotting dilapidated barrier on the western slope of Monticello at full speed, and now he rested in the cool, vaulted overgrown forest, still criss-crossed with Thomas Jefferson's bridle paths.

It was the first time he had returned home for the summer in two years. The handsome face and the pure gaze were slightly touched with the cynicism of his profession. He was a Washington lawyer now, considered one of the best, and he was Washington-wise and Washington-weary, full of compromise, adroit at survival, and totally successful. The beautiful mouth revealed a line of disappointment. There was no more black or white in his life, only infinite shades of gray.

As the brilliant June light filtered down, flecking the fair hair and the flanks of his mount, Nathan was suddenly invaded by a pervasive, unfounded premonition of disaster, a rising dread as he continued up the mountain to the mansion.

When he came to the leveled-off clearing at the top of the mountain, he stared in horror at Monticello. It stood naked. The lofty elegant shade trees that had protected and surrounded it for seventy years had all been cut down, the stumps still white, raw, and ugly. Even in his shock, Nathan Langdon's legal mind registered the fact that he was trespassing. Monticello had been sold last year to a pharmacy shop owner in Charlottesville, the new rising race of a new era: that of the common man.

Nathan stared at the decaying gray facade. It was deserted. Burwell's paint had peeled off, Joe Fosset's iron balconies were rusted and crumbling, John Hemings' shingles were warped or missing. It no longer belonged to Sally Hemings. Langdon smiled. It no longer belonged to the heirs of Thomas Jefferson. Why did he always think of it as belonging to Sally Hemings instead of the other way around?

It was now five years since his first meeting with Sally Hemings. Four years since his banishment. He had learned nothing more of her than what he had known from the beginning. He had encountered only evasiveness and omissions.

Terror seized Nathan. If this is what they had done to what had been Thomas Jefferson's mansion, what had they done to Sally Hemings?

Langdon started down the mountain toward her cabin, fighting a rising anguish. Where was she? What had become of her?

He rode within sight of the tiny cabin but he didn't dare approach. The old yearning returned, something—as infinitesimal as a rustling branch or a leaf, or the wind, or a pebble beneath his mount's hoof, or the sound of his own heart beating—held him back.

In the distance he saw the small figure emerge from the house. She was alive. Who was it, he thought, who had said: ... and then consider what mere Time will do ...: how if a man was great while living, he became tenfold greater when dead. How a thing grows in the human imagination when love, worship and all that lies in the human heart is there to encourage it.... Enough for us to discern far in the uttermost distance, some gleam ...in the center of that enormous camera-obscura image to discern that at the center of it all was not a madness and a nothing, but a sanity and a something.

He watched her as she stood, her arms wrapped around herself. And as he watched her, Nathan Langdon felt the gulf between them. It had grown, he realized, with the years. Even as he stood there unknowing, the distance separating them was a canyon, a bottomless crater, a fissure in the earth, uncrossable, unbridgeable, unfathomable, unforgivable. The sound of summer thunder rolled over the Blue Ridge Mountains, a distant prediction of turbulence to come. What Nathan Langdon did not know is that the turbulence to come, which he would witness in sickness and despair, would claim the lives of three of Sally Hemings' grandsons. A bitter struggle that would cost five hundred thousand lives. One life lost for every slave freed.

Sally Hemings stood in the violet rectangle of her cabin, her arms outstretched, her palms pressed against the oak doorframe, the dark shadows framing the still lovely face. She contemplated the cherished and familiar landscape. It calmed her. The lush Southernness soothed her nerve ends, the colors washed over her flesh so long contorted and deep with memory. Memory had no shame. All were equal before it. Then she stepped outside. Her body dove into the languid summer landscape like a swimmer, and her head lifted as if she sensed a presence. She looked toward the Blue Ridge. But all she saw was the dark-green forest and luminous sky and all she heard were the sounds that summer makes.

She had never reached out beyond her triple bondage. She had clung stubbornly to the only thing she had ever found of her own in life: love, and love had been more real to her than slavehood. And she had survived both. This was the truth of her life.

Sally Hemings closed her eyes against the sunlight and against the blinding pain in her head. She stood in her own embrace, triumphant; beyond love, beyond passion, beyond History.

And surrounding the two solitary figures, lost in the vast intractable wilderness of the American landscape, was the infinite chiaroscuro of silence, where all biographies become one.

She picked up her skirts and started up the mountain toward the safety of her beloved shade trees, just as, with a kind of violence, the census taker turned away and headed back down her road.